State of the art in marketing hospital foodservice departments.

The purposes of this study were to identify the state of the art relative to the utilization of marketing techniques within hospital foodservice departments throughout the United States and to determine whether any relationships existed between the degree of utilization of marketing techniques and selected demographic characteristics of the foodservice administrators and/or operations. A validated questionnaire was mailed to 600 randomly selected hospital foodservice administrators requesting information related to marketing in their facilities. Forty-five percent of the questionnaires were returned and analyzed for frequency of response and significant relationship between variables. Chi-square was used for nominal data and Spearman rho for ranked data. Approximately 73% of the foodservice administrators stated that marketing was extremely important in the success of a hospital foodservice department. Respondents (79%) further indicated that marketing had become more important in their departments in the past 2 years. Departmental records, professional journals, foodservice suppliers, observation, and surveys were the sources most often used to obtain marketing data, a responsibility generally assumed by the foodservice director (86.2%). Merchandising, public relations, and word-of-mouth reputation were regarded as the most important aspects of marketing. Increased sales, participation, good will, departmental recognition, and employee satisfaction were used most frequently to evaluate the success of implemented marketing techniques. Marketing audits as a means of evaluating the success of marketing were used to a limited extent by the respondents.